"Homosexuality is a ticking time bomb for the Catholic Church," says 'an openly gay former Dominican friar. Mark Dowd, who is now a journalist, said research for his 2001 Channel 4 documentary Queer and Catholic suggested that at least half of people attracted into seminaries in the priesthood are gay. Mr Dowd added:

‘I've got my own experience of being in religious life myself. And I can tell you that gay men are massively, massively overrepresented in Catholic life. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that a lot of them are told that they are intrinsically unhealthy according to church teaching. And that's not a very appropriate state of affairs if we're talking about psychosexual health and emotional maturity. When you have this culture of secrecy and guilt and repression, you have conditions which foster the potential for blackmail and for manipulation. This is a very unhealthy stage for the church, because basically when you have secrecy, you have lies - and when you have lies, people often are put in terrible pressures of being compromised."

Last weekend Italian newspapers published claims of homosexuality and blackmail within the church, with one allegation centering around a secret ‘gay cabal’ of priests, according to a CNN report. Italian media also ran stories last week about the alleged contents of a secret report prepared for the Pope by a commission of three cardinals who investigated the Vatileaks scandal last year. Earlier this week Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, was forced to quit by the Pope as a further sex scandal swept the church. In addition, Paolo Gabriele, the pope's butler, was convicted of stealing personal papal documents and leaking them to the media. He was subsequently jailed but later pardoned by the pope. The documents alleged corruption in the Vatican and infighting over the running of its bank, which has been at the heart of a series of scandals in past decades. But the Vatican has denied all allegations and accused Italian media of spreading "false and damaging" reports in an attempt to influence cardinals who will meet next month in a secret conclave to elect a new pope.

I guess my question is, is any body surprised? Church leaders have written about same-sex sexual activities since the first decades of Christianity. Christianity developed in the Greco-Roman milieux, which was Pansexual and homophilic to say the least. In the Greco-Roman world certain "homosexual" practices were socially accepted, especially the pederastic relationship of an adult male with a youth, or in the case of Rome, an Adult male with a slave boy. What was less acceptable, at times even reviled, was the sexual relationship between to male adults. Often, what we take as prohibitions or condemnations against homosexuality was specifically aimed at adult-adult relationship and not adult-boy relationships. Furthermore, though a sexual dalliance between an adult and a boy, often extended into the latter's adulthood, the rule was that all males would eventually marry and sire children. Thus, the modern idea of a male couple who prefer homosexual acts to heterosexual acts and refrained from marriage or sexual acts with women entirely, was alien to Greco-Roman culture. When we speak of Greco-Roman “homosexuality” and the modern construct, we are speaking about oranges and apples.Historian John Boswell in his Christianity, Homosexuality and Social Tolerance argued that until the 12th century Christendom tolerated same-sex relationships between males. One of his best examples was his contention that adelphopoiesis, a Christian rite for uniting two persons of the same sex as "spiritual brothers/sisters," amounted to an approved outlet for romantic and indeed sexual love between couples of the same sex. Boswell used the adelphopoiesis of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, which depicted the two standing together with Jesus between or behind them, a position he identifies with a pronubus or "best man." His critics have countered that this union created was more like blood brotherhood; and that this icon is a typical example of an icon depicting two saints who were martyred together, with the usual image of Christ that appears on many religious icons, and therefore that there is no indication that it depicts a "wedding". However, Boswell refutes them pointing out that the Saints were both referred to as erastai in ancient Greek manuscripts, which is the same word used to describe lovers. But even if we discount Boswell's argument, I would ask, when did the homosexual behavior that has been being exposed for decades now, begin? Did some historical event or trend “give birth” to it or has it always been a part of church “culture”? I would argue that it is a logical consequence of the entrenched doctrinal and historical misogyny that came to dominant Christian thinking in the early centuries. In my Distorted Truths, I making the point that this was the basis of the clash between the Valentinian Gnostics and the Orthodoxy, the then two leading schools of Christianity. One group women-loving, the other women-hating, and unfortunately we know which group prevailed. Therefore, to answer my own question, where or when did this is same-sex behavior originate: It had been there all along--part of the church inheritance from the Greco-Roman world.